American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) Chief Science Officer Holly Johnson, PhD, represented AHPA member interests at AOAC International's Stakeholder Panel for Dietary Supplements held in Washington, D.C. recently. The panel was chaired by Darryl Sullivan at AHPA member company Covance, and Brian Schaneberg, director QA, regulatory, at member company Starbucks served as vice chair of the panel.

AOAC is in the last year of a contract with the National Institutes of Health-Office of Dietary Supplements (NIH/ODS) to establish voluntary consensus standards for high-priority dietary supplement ingredients. The NIH/ODS program with AOAC engages the dietary supplements industry to develop voluntary consensus standards in an effort to standardize and modernize methods. Industry is encouraged to participate to help drive and move the effort forward to ensure that the work is relevant.

Dr. Johnson served as chair for the working group on skullcap and presented new standard method performance requirement (SMPR) documents for identification and quantitative methods in evaluation of skullcap materials.

The efforts of working groups on kava and resveratrol were presented by Steven Dentali of Dentali Botanical Sciences, and Richard van Breeman, the director of the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.

Four new SMPRs were approved by the stakeholder panel and new calls for methods will be announced soon for kava, resveratrol, and skullcap.

There are also still open calls for methods for a variety of botanical materials, including: echinacea, ginger, SAMe, ginseng, cinnamon, anthocyanins, and others.